Ours to Lose

When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City

Amy Starecheski

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226399942, 9780226399805
• eBook ISBN: 9780226400006
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Though New York's Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan.
 
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Narrators
• The Eleven Buildings
• Introduction
• 1  From Drug Murder to Door Ceremony: Claiming Buildings, Building Claims
• 2  Who Deserves Housing?: The Battle for East Thirteenth Street
• 3  Making the Deal: Debating the Values of Housing
• 4  Why Work?: The Values of Labor
• 5  Making Claims on the Past and the Future: Debt, Kinship, History, and the Temporality of Homeownership
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• References
• Index